


we are not traitors but the lights go out

by jaekyu



Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: Ambiguous Relationships, Future Fic, Implied Sexual Content, Implied/Referenced Cheating, M/M, POV Alternating, POV Second Person, POV Third Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-15
Updated: 2020-09-15
Packaged: 2021-03-06 23:42:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,737
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26277358
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jaekyu/pseuds/jaekyu
Summary: You wonder what you might have done had you had the courage. If you had been more sure of yourself, if you had been less afraid of the consequences. If you had better understood what you wanted, how you wanted it and who you wanted it with.Five years after the fact, Taeyong visits Yuta in Japan.
Relationships: Lee Taeyong/Nakamoto Yuta, Minor or Background Relationship(s)
Comments: 9
Kudos: 46
Collections: K-Pop Ficmix 2020





	we are not traitors but the lights go out

**Author's Note:**

  * For [plotdevice](https://archiveofourown.org/users/plotdevice/gifts).
  * Inspired by [high testimony](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20021059) by [plotdevice](https://archiveofourown.org/users/plotdevice/pseuds/plotdevice). 



> hello, my dear recipient ♡ this fic you wrote immediately intrigued me for it's melancholic vibe and themes of missed chances and regrets. i love ambiguous relationships & future fic a lot, so this was right up my alley! it was on my mind constantly from the moment i read it and i knew i had to try and capture some of those vibes in my own fic. this is my first ever remix, so i hope you enjoy!
> 
> if you're looking for some mood music, might i suggest: [chelsea hotel no. 2](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7hKFZFcg7Cs) by rufus wainwright, [i still remember](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5R-9IgWD36A) by bloc party & [nearer my god](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umMI3u_-C78) by foxing.

__I love a good place to hide in plain sight_ _  
**— PUNISHER** , Phoebe Bridgers 

have you forgotten what we were like then  
when we were still first rate  
and the day came fat with an apple in its mouth  
  
it's no use worrying about time  
but we did have a few tricks up our sleeves  
and turned some sharp corners  
  
the whole pasture looked like our meal  
we didn't need speedometers  
we could manage cocktails out of ice and water  
**— FRANK O’HARA**

_**O N E.** _

The first time he kissed you, you were both much younger.

This was in America. This was in a hotel room with the curtains open, the moon hung fat above the world, with a corona so bright it hurt to look at. You had both been drinking but he had been drinking more. You think you might have been in love with him back then, at least a little bit. But, maybe not, because things had always moved so fast, changed trajectories from one day to another, so maybe it turned your head into a mess that didn’t know up from down.

It doesn’t matter if you loved him back then. You were sitting on the edge of the same bed in the same hotel room and no one else was around. He was laughing at something you said, and you can’t remember what. His face had that high blush on his cheek he’d get from drinking. You’re not sure if you were in love with him back then but you know you thought he was beautiful. It was easy to think he was beautiful. Most people did; he had those sharp eyes and the jaw like a diamond cut glass but something in his demeanor made it all seem softer.

He was a beautiful boy and he was sitting next to you on the bed and then, all of a sudden, he had pressed his warm, alcohol-wet mouth against yours. Your hand gripped into his thigh and his hand framed your face, fingers curled along your jaw. It was a slow, methodical kiss and you began to regret it almost as soon as it began, but you did not regret it enough to pull away. You think you might have been more selfish back then and you’re not exactly sure if you ever grew out of it, especially when it comes to him. He kissed you like he knew you were thinking of pulling away but you knew -- you knew there was not an _after_ to a kiss like this. It had begun and it would end and that would be it. It would be a moment hung in time, a butterfly pinned and framed to be left on the wall; beautiful and lacking any kind of past or future.

You knew this was how it was going to go. You do not take it personally when he says to you, years later, _I never could have done this back then._

_**T W O.** _

Taeyong calls long-distance from Seoul. Yuta picks up on the third ring.

“I heard Japan is nice this time of year,” Taeyong says.

Yuta stares out the picture window. The sky is dark grey. It’s going to rain soon.

“Yes,” Yuta replies. “We’ve had lots of sun these days. Why? Were you thinking of dropping by to see an old friend, Taeyong?”

The phone line is quiet for a few moments; white noise crackles over it, punctuations to sentences that do not exist. Finally, Taeyong speaks.

“I was thinking I’d come visit,” he finally says. “If you’d have me?”

_**T H R E E.** _

There was this nebulous way you thought of seeing them all again, after you left. It was never anything concrete. You never penciled something like _coffee w/ Johnny, 10AM_ or _lunch @ Doyoung’s, 1PM, bring tamagoyaki_ into your calendar. But you always had the thought, in the back of your head, that the day would come. _I’ll see them again_ , you said to yourself, in the dry, recycled air of the airplane from Incheon to Kansai. _I’ll see them again_ , you thought to yourself, as the years dragged on, and you moved further and further from that part of your life. _I’ll see them again, some day_ , you believed and no one ignored you, per se, but no one ever called, and you never did see anyone, not for awhile.

And then, eventually, someone did call. Eventually, Taeyong called.

_**F O U R.** _

Taeyong looks the same, except for all the ways he doesn’t.

There are these deep-set lines into the corners of his mouth and these less prominent ones around the corners of his eyes. He does not look old but -- he looks experienced, like years and years have passed. Because he is, because they have.

It’s so easy for Yuta to forget the space and time that have stretched out around them, especially with Taeyong here in his living room.

“How long has it been?” Yuta asks. They have already eaten. Now they are drinking. Taeyong had given the bottle of sake a moment of pause, when he first saw it, but he let Yuta pour him a cup all the same. Now, he lets Yuta refill it.

“Four years, I think,” Taeyong replies, then he considers the question a little longer, shakes his head. “No, I suppose it’s more like five.”

Yuta smiles. “Almost six, actually.”

“Why did you ask if you knew the answer?”

“I wanted to see if you remembered.”

**_F I V E._ **

The second time he kisses you, you are both much older.

He says something about taking the guest room. You tell him no, that won’t be necessary. He looks at you, mouth turned down at the corners, and something heavy brewing behind the dark pools of his eyes. You don’t consider the option that you may have misjudged the situation. He’s been broadcasting his thoughts since the moment he arrived, maybe because he’s afraid of being misunderstood. But he is not being misunderstood. You are not misunderstanding him.

He says, “are you sure?”

And you say, “of course I’m sure.”

He pauses to chew on his bottom lip. You are sitting on the same side of the table. If he unfurled his fist, his fingers might brush against yours. He is not so gentle -- he curls his hand into the collar of your shirt, he pulls you forward, he slots your mouths together. You think about how you can always recognize the smell of your mother making yasai itame, and how the thought of it always brings you back to the kitchen you were raised in. You recognize the taste of his mouth the same way, a sweetness ruined by bitter alcohol, and it takes you back to the first time in the hotel room in America.

Sometimes it feels you were never the person you were back then -- the person crafted entirely for consumption by others, the person at the complete mercy of everything around them, the person living a life for everyone else but themselves -- but you think, that night, in that hotel room, that was the closest you ever got to feeling real back then. Like the world extended beyond your tiny piece of it and you had a past and a future that converged together all at once.

This kiss -- the one in your home you’ve owned for years, in the country you grew up in, with hands and a heart that feel more weathered than they have any right to -- feels like a tether to that old life.

When he pulls away from you, his breath is coming hard and fast. You press your hand against his chest. His heartbeat greets you, pumping blood steadily against the weight of your palm. “I wanted to do that -- much sooner. But I wasn’t -- I wasn’t sure.”

You smile at him, soft and maybe a little sad. There is no moon in the sky, not from where you can see. “It’s okay,” you tell him, and then you kiss him again.

_**S I X.** _

“Is this why you came to visit?” Yuta asks and it’s mostly a joke, really, he’s only teasing. But Taeyong lifts his head from where he was pressing open-mouthed kisses along Yuta’s jaw and neck to look him in the eye.

“No,” his reply is sincere. He lays above Yuta, legs bracketing his waist, hair falling into his eyes. “No -- I -- I wanted to see you. I thought -- maybe, _maybe_ \-- but I never. I would have still come to see you -- even if I thought that you didn’t -- didn’t want.”

Yuta pushes back the hair from Taeyong’s eyes. He cups the underside of his jaw, watches his expression carefully, laughs a little, with an upturn at the corner of his mouth. “You’re rambling, Taeyong,” he speaks gently into the space between them, as if it is constructed from cracked glass. “But I believe you.”

Yuta’s hand moves to curl around the back of Taeyong’s neck and he pulls Taeyong down to meet his mouth in a kiss.

They fall into each other as if it has always been this easy. As if their universe has always existed around this exact moment and their whole lives have been in preparation for it. Taeyong melts against Yuta. He fumbles at his waistband, the button and fly. They kiss, long and hot. They do not speak much, only small affirmations at every new press of flesh against flesh. Taeyong makes quiet whines in the back of his throat. Yuta threads both of his hands into Taeyong’s hair and tugs. Electricity builds between them, sparking in the soft grey-blue darkness of Yuta’s room.

Taeyong rolls his hips against Yuta’s, swallows the gasp it elicits into his own mouth, and the night swallows them both in return.

_**S E V E N.** _

You wonder what you might have done had you had the courage. If you had been more sure of yourself, if you had been less afraid of the consequences. If you had better understood what you wanted, how you wanted it and who you wanted it with.

Those things have come with age, you suppose, but still -- you wonder what it might have been like had you had it back then.

You wake the morning after the first kiss sharing the same hotel bed. You’re not sure when you fell asleep. You’re not sure how long you’ve even slept for, but exhaustion tugs at your limbs and eyelids. You wish you could surrender to the oblivion of unconsciousness again, but then he stirs next to you, and you think you must be awake for this.

He sits up. You remain laying down, only raised up onto your elbows. He rubs a hand over his face, digs the crusted evidence of sleep out of his eyes. “What time is it?” He asks you.

You don’t know. You haven’t checked. You do not answer.

He turns to look at you, properly, the first time since he’s woken up. You notice, now, that the two of you had fallen asleep in your clothes. The collar of his shirt is rumpled, your jeans have rucked up and gotten caught around your calf. In the corner of the room, there is a table with a half-empty bottle of alcohol on it.

“I need water,” he declares. Neither of you still have any idea what time it is. You think you are content with that; you think you can wait for the proverbial, or, for the actual knock on the door, to raise you out of this room that has come to feel sort of like a tomb.

Something has been lost here. Something is gone and will never come back.

You think about courage; you consider the definition of it. You wonder if it is always climbing the face of the mountain, or if sometimes it can be simply turning around and going home after realizing you can’t.

He drinks water straight from the faucet. He leaves the bathroom door open and you watch him do it. Watch him lean over and cup it into his hands, wash it over his face, watch as it drips down his chin and wets him across his shirt.

“What did we do last night?” And he does not ask the question like someone who is looking for an answer. He looks at you through the buffer of the mirror, like looking you in the eyes would be too much. He asks you the question and he begs you to lie to him.

“Nothing,” you answer and you think about courage. “We laughed until it hurt, because we were drunk, and then we must have both fallen asleep. Don’t you remember?”

He looks at you like he knows you’re lying. As if he didn’t ask you to do it. As if he doesn’t know you’d break open your chest cavity and present him with any organ he wanted if he asked it of you.

You blink at him. You say, without using any words, _this is what you want from me_.

And so, years later, when he’s in your house, and he presses you back into the couch and kisses you in broad daylight, your cup of tea cooling on the kitchen counter and he says _I never could have done this back then_ , you do not take it personally.

_**E I G H T.** _

“Does someone else live here? With you?”

Yuta hums in mild disapproval at the question. He picks at the limp vegetables left over on his plate. “What makes you ask that?”

“Nothing,” Taeyong lies, then he corrects. “Everything. I can’t help but feel like -- feel like I’m intruding on something, while I’m here.”

And, in fairness, Yuta has made no efforts to trick Taeyong into believing things that are false. Taeyong has never asked the question and so Yuta has never offered the answer. Sometimes things are simpler if you leave the lid on them. Sometimes moments can exist outside of the greater timeline that makes up your life. If anyone has taught Yuta about that, well, it was Taeyong.

Yuta hums again. “It doesn’t matter,” he replies.

“Should it?”

“I suppose that’s up to interpretation, Taeyong,” Yuta abandons his plate of food. He folds his hands together. “Does it matter in the grand scheme of things? That’s a loaded question. I don’t think I can answer that. Does it matter right now, when it’s just you and I here? Does it matter tomorrow? No. I don’t think so.”

Yuta can see the tight clench of Taeyong’s jaw, for just a second, before it relaxes again.

“There’s a lot of things we don’t talk about anymore, huh?”

Yuta laughs. “There was a lot of stuff we didn’t talk about back then either.”

_**N I N E.** _

He finds you in the bathroom brushing your teeth. “I shouldn’t have asked,” he says to you, meeting your eyes through your reflections in the mirror.

You spit into the sink, wipe your mouth with the back of your hand. “No,” you reply. “You shouldn’t have.”

“It’s hard for me to not,” and he has always been doomed to say what he means, that’s his worst habit. “It’s hard for me to not worry about -- everything.”

“I know,” you turn to face him, bracing your hands against the sink that’s now behind you. “You always think too much. About everything.”

He holds your gaze for a few seconds, then his eyes drop. You tug him closer by his belt loops. “Stop thinking,” you tell him and then you sink to your knees in front of him.

Here are all the things you don’t tell him: you don’t tell him that all of this, the days he has spent with you, no matter how long they drag on, feel exactly the same way the kiss in the hotel room in America did. You do not tell him about the unshakeable temporariness of all of this. It is beautiful and it exists, in all its glory, in the moments in which it is happening. But it will never go beyond that; they will preserve this in a jar and put it on a shelf, and eventually it will collect dust, and eventually it will be forgotten. You don’t tell him that’s why it doesn’t matter. You don’t tell him you are everything to each other in these moments, and when these moments end you will return to being nothing.

When he comes it’s when he’s still in your mouth, one hand gripping the cold porcelain of the sink and the other against your shoulder. You stand after he’s finished. You spit into the sink. You let him turn you around and press you up against the sink, lick into your mouth, struggle a hand down the front of your pants.

You don’t know what he thinks might be happening here. You do not tell him about what you know is happening.

Maybe you were a little bit in love with him back then. It doesn’t matter. You are not in love with him now.

_**T E N.** _

“Did you always know?”

“Did I always know what?”

“Lots of things, I guess.” The days are starting to weigh heavier on both of them. It feels like all they do is speak in riddles, in code, or they speak in more primal ways -- hands and mouths against skin. “That you were going to leave. That you -- _we_ , that we weren’t like the rest of them.”

“I knew I was going to leave before you left for service,” Yuta admits. He ignores the second question.

Taeyong’s brows furrow and it exposes the usually, mostly hidden wrinkles in his forehead. “Why didn’t you say anything? You didn’t want to tell me?”

“I was -- there were some things I was processing,” Yuta replies. He wishes he had better answers, but the truth is hardly ever satisfying. “I don’t think I knew consciously but I think -- I think subconsciously I had already made the choice. I’m sorry if that hurts to hear.”

Taeyong frowns. He does not say anything.

“What’s it like?” Yuta asks. “To still only exist for other people?”

“Exhausting,” Taeyong is still frowning when he says it. “Why do you think I’m here.”

Yuta laughs, a genuine fit of giggles that erupts from his belly. “Yeah. That’s what I thought.”

“What’s it like? Being rid of all of it.”

“A lot more boring then you’d expect, Taeyong,” and when Yuta smiles it’s all teeth.

_**E L E V E N.** _

“Do you miss it?” Haruo had asked you, when you first started seeing each other. His father was Japanese, and his mother was from England, and his English name was John, which always tied a knot of nostalgia in your gut when you thought of it.

“Miss what?” You had asked him back. You were in a restaurant, drinking sake and eating sashimi.

“Performing, being famous, I don’t know,” he shrugged. “All of it?”

“I don’t miss all of it,” you shook your head. “Only parts of it. My friends, traveling. The people who love you for no real reason other than being yourself.”

“What don’t you miss?”

“Pretending,” you refilled your cup to the brim, licked at the rim when some spilled. “A lot of it is just pretending. That’s what they never tell you, when you’re training. You take acting classes but they never tell you -- they never tell you all you’ll ever be doing is acting. Some of us are better at it than others, I suppose.”

Haruo had this look in his eyes; as if he didn’t like the portrait you were painting, but he was too invested in the plot to turn away. “Were you good at it?”

You had smiled, then. Your cup of sake was empty again. You pressed the length of your foot against Haruo’s under the table. “Oh,” you had leered, “yes. I was quite good at it.”

_**T W E L V E.** _

“Can I tell you something?” Yuta says into the darkness that surrounds him and Taeyong. It’s easier to have these conversations in the dark. The edges are dulled when you can’t see them; in broad daylight they are too sharp, sharp enough to maim, sharp enough to rip you open and bleed you out.

“Whatever you want, Yuta,” and when Taeyong says it Yuta believes him.

“I think I might have loved you,” Yuta’s hand finds Taeyong’s, scrambling across the sheets of the bed they share, laying side by side. They are both naked, sweat cooling on their heated skin. “Back then, a long time ago. I’m not sure, really. But I think -- I think maybe.”

Yuta is not sure why he says it. He doesn’t know what reaction he was expecting. All he knows that the truth of it was growing in his chest like a tumor, and he had to cut it out it before it turned malignant.

Taeyong is silent for a moment that stretches out like a spiderweb between them. They both breathe slowly, both of their heartbeats slow; it’s almost as if the world itself has slowed and given them pause.

Then, finally, Taeyong says: “You should have asked me. You should have asked me if I felt that way too.”

“No. You didn’t want me to,” Yuta pushes a foot between both of Taeyong’s calves. “Back then, I would have done anything for you.”

“And now?”

Yuta scoffs. He examines Taeyong’s face very carefully; it’s hard in the darkness, so instead he touches him, blind. He runs the pad of his finger along the bruises caused by sleeplessness around Taeyong’s eyes, down the slope of his nose. Across the soft pillow of his lips, down past his adam’s apple, until he’s settling a hand against Taeyong’s sternum, still damp with sweat and running hot.

“I don’t know,” Yuta replies, honest. “I don’t know about now.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You don’t have to apologize. I don’t want you to apologize.”

“I don’t know what else I’m supposed to do.”

Yuta says nothing. He digs his nails into Taeyong’s skin, against the cage of his sternum and ribs, and kisses him.

Taeyong kisses him back.

_**T H I R T E E N.** _

You know the moment can’t last forever. But, you think, that’s part of what makes it beautiful.

**Author's Note:**

> title from [Saying Your Names](http://youngerpoets.yupnet.org/2008/04/17/saying-your-names-crush-by-richard-siken-2004-winner/) by Richard Siken. The Frank O'Hara poem quoted is [Animals](https://www.frankohara.org/writing/)


End file.
